


Haunted Shatterdomes: The Corridor

by Jenni_Snake



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Haunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-02-15 23:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2248134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenni_Snake/pseuds/Jenni_Snake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tendo hasn't been getting enough sleep, but is what he's hearing in the halls of the Shatterdome just a hallucination, or something more sinister?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunted Shatterdomes: The Corridor

The noise in the Shatterdomes was something you never noticed. Between pipes, ventilation, heating systems, cooling systems, steel doors clanging, boots on grated floors, and all of it ricocheting off the metal walls, there was a constant low-level cacophony. You got used to it. Just a background hum. Until it stopped, and you remembered what quiet sounded like.

It hadn’t been a long call, but the LOCCENT graveyard shift still thought they’d play it safe. It took Tendo all of five minutes to figure out the cause of the strange readings from the breach, just a small power supply anomaly on their end, but it was three in the morning by the time he headed back to the bed he’d only manage to fall into a few hours before. He was working with just a skeleton crew of brain cells.

So he thought he was hearing things when the fan stopped. Everything went calm as it powered down, and the tension fell from his shoulders. It was strange how the noise had such a profound effect. It was only then that he heard the scratching.

It was quiet at first, and he thought he had imagined it. There was nothing in the corridor that ran parallel to the one he was in, except a set of double metal doors fifty feet down the wall. That was where the sound had come from, he thought. If there even had been a sound. It was probably just his ears readjusting to the silence, that was all. He was about to walk away when it came again. He blinked and went closer. The sound was frantic, coming from the other side of the door. Rats? Just one? Did this city even have rats? As he bent down in front of the doors, the sound stopped. He waited, but it didn’t come back, even when he put a hand to the door. Whatever it was had been scared off. Making a mental note to have a maintenance engineer check it out in case whatever it was got into the wiring, he headed back to his quarters.

It wasn’t until two days later, still groggy from crawling out of bed after not crawling into it early enough the night before, and not yet having had his coffee, that he noticed the same sound coming from the empty corridor, louder now, because he could hear it over all the background noise. The scratching at the door was more forceful, and nearly as frantic. It stopped as soon as he came near. He jumped when he heard a clang on the other side, three times, a metallic knocking. He took a step closer and knocked back twice. A chill ran down his spine as his rhythm was echoed. He did it again, four times, and the same pattern was repeated back, with the same tempo. Rubbing his hands over his face, he shook his head to clear it. It was too early and he hadn’t had any caffeine yet. It was probably just air in the pipes, and he hurried away making the excuse to himself that he was going to find the engineer who was checking on the rats and update them. Just as soon as he got a cup of coffee or two. And an extra one for good measure.

All the way to the LOCCENT, he dwelled on what had happened, dreaming up vague outlines of what might be crouching behind the door. What sort of creature could scratch so frantically, unable to escape, yet have the strength to bang so loudly? The thought still sent a chill down his spine, even with the hot coffee that burned his tongue.

Settling into his chair in front of the console of lighted dials and plastic knobs, Tendo started to doubt whether he himself hadn’t been the source of the noise. Had whatever was skulking behind the door followed the patterns he had knocked out, or was his tired mind playing tricks on him? Had he merely been echoing a noise in the pipes that ran through the walls? Staring through the holoscreen radar display that blipped before his eyes, he thought back to what he had heard. It was impossible to remember with certainty which sound had come first. Chasing the memory was maddening, but he soon forgot that he was even thinking about it as he was handed a LOCCENT report summary from the night before and began to read.

Finishing the few pages, he pushed them aside, and the train of thought floated back to his mind. He considered that the whole thing might just be someone asinine trick. It wasn’t hard to come up with a list of a half a dozen people from mechanics to operations to K-sci that could pull this kind of prank. He reddened with embarrassment at the idea that they were having a good laugh at his expense already. After that, the memory of the incident faded like a dream, at first as he tried to narrow down who the idiot might be, then as more mundane but pressing matters took up all of his attention.

Lunch was rarely a fixed time for him and whoever he was working with, and it was two o'clock before he headed to eat with the Marshal just behind him. It wasn’t just the daylight, or that having been up for so many hours made the fear he had felt on the outskirts of wakefulness laughable. Nor was he looking to challenge what he had seen in the clear light of day. In fact, he wouldn’t have even thought of going down the corridor if it hadn’t been a shortcut to the mess.

He didn’t even really think about it, more that his legs took him there on instinct. As he walked, he and the Marshal talked over the aberrant data they received from the breach, and whose inexplicableness had prompted them to finally break to eat. Not looking where he was going, Tendo walked face first into a solid wall. He stumbled back, reeling, and the Marshal put a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

“Are you all right, Commander?”

“Yeah, fine. Just not getting enough sleep, I guess.”

“Want me to turn that into an order?”

Tendo stared at the wall bewildered, as if that it would make it disappear and offer up the corridor behind it.

“No, no,” he said, still dazed, “that’s good.”

“Good. There’s no way this place could operate with you out of commission. Let’s go.”

They smirked, but neither of them laughed, knowing it was only half a joke, and they headed the long way around to the mess.

Sixteen hours after a shift that felt like it would never end, Tendo staggered towards his quarters. He stopped dead at the exact same spot he had met the wall face first at lunch. He thought he must have gotten turned around earlier, because here he was, standing at the end of the corridor. At its other end, not a hundred yards away, a mechanic walked by, streaks of grease on her face, equipment slung over her shoulder, and disappeared from sight. The only thing he felt was a flush of humiliation at getting lost before. Finally back at his quarters, he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Not an hour later he was shocked awake by the lights and klaxons that signalled a breach emergency. Heart racing, he sprang out of bed already dressed from the night before, and rushed to the operations room. Only the sound of his own boots clanging on the grate echoed through the empty halls. He swung into the LOCCENT only stopping when he reached the breach sensor console.

It was normal. In fact, there weren’t any alarms going off in the control centre. He turned slowly only to find there was no one else around. Through the ringing in his ears, all he could hear was the hum of computers and the clicking of the needle that dragged ink across a stream of paper. There was a swoosh and a crinkle as the readout piled on top of itself, and he could hear his own panting.

Stepping out into the hallway, he heard a far-off banging. His body registered the fear before his brain, and by the time his legs had brought him once again to the end of the corridor, he was close to hyperventilating. The doors were being jostled, he could see them being pushed roughly from the other side. Somehow he found himself standing before them, not knowing what he was doing. He put both arms out, as if he could find the strength to push back, keep it closed, but saw his hands trembling in front of him. 

He was frozen, watching. It was as though he was floating in a dream, something pushing down on his chest, making it hard to get enough air into his lungs. The deafening clang of the doors shaking on their hinges was almost too much noise, and it sounded muted, still far away.

Then it stopped. Instead, the door handle moved. It was turned, then rattled. Then it stopped, too. Tendo could feel the blood pounding in bursts in his head. There was a slow pressing at the doors, not loud this time, straining at the bolts, making a gap appear between them. He could hear breathing that wasn’t his own, grunting with effort, raspy and deep. There was a growl, and the scratching on the metal like claws that stopped only for them to slip out of his imagination and into reality through the crack in the door. Now that he could see the hand clearly, he saw that they weren’t claws that scratched but fingernails, black and hard like rock, fingers barely recognizable, covered with skin as thin as parchment, dried and discoloured, showing every knob and sinew, somehow still grasping though it couldn’t possibly have moved on its own.

Tendo thought he would have been the kind of person who screamed, but the sound was trapped tight in his throat and the hand was the last thing he saw before he bolted, tripping once but pressing on despite the deep cut in his arm. Finally back in his own room, lungs burning, he slammed the door shut and steadied his hand just enough to bolt the lock. He leapt onto the bed, plastering his back against the wall, eyes fixed on the door, hands steepled together, fingers worrying desperately at the rosary beads slung around his wrist, reciting any and every prayer he had ever learned until the daylight started to lighten the skylight and he leaned back, dead asleep.

*

The next morning, Tendo took the long way around to work, only vaguely aware of having had a fitful night’s sleep, and not fully remembering the circumstances that had required him to patch up the rather severe gash on his arm.

He caught a glimpse of himself in a window, straightened his bowtie and suspenders, ran a hand through his hair, but couldn’t do anything about the dark circles under his eyes. He downed the last bit of his first cup of coffee, then checked in with the engineer he had asked to see about the rats. She looked at him guiltily for a moment before sheepishly admitting that she hadn't been able to find the place he was talking about.

But she was more thorough than to just leave him with that. Leaning over a roll of original blueprints for the building, she tucked a loose curl behind her ear and started her explanation.

"The original naval base used to store nuclear fuel in that general area, but there were structural problems that led to a massive leak back in the sixties. They reinforced the lead containment barriers, then filled the whole structure in with five hundred tons of concrete. It took just over twenty four hours to do the whole thing. It was a bit of a rush job, I mean, it would have to have been. Some of the crew was lost, but there weren’t any details in the reports. Twenty years later, the radiation levels had stabilized, and they started to use that part of the base again. About five years after that, they expanded and built the barracks on the other side. That was really all I could find. Sorry, I know it's not much help, but I guess the bright side is that we probably don't have any rats."


End file.
